-The book innovates by bridging two interdisciplinary fields, urban history and life writing studies. - It captures the ‘Longue durée’; the development of life writing and urban life from 18th century to today, including digital forms and practices. - Most chapters reflect on the life stories of ‘ordinary’ people (workers, women, migrants, queer subjects) who have been marginalized and are still under-represented in scholarly research. Among these figures are those who have achieved fame or iconic status, like Anne Frank, whose stories will be examined from a fresh and innovative perspective.

Do narratives make nations, and if so, did networks make this happen? The notion that national and other group identities are constructed and sustained by narratives and images has been widely postulated for several decades now. This volume contributes to this debate, with a particular emphasis on the networked, transnational nature of cultural nation-building processes in a comparative European and sometimes extra-European context. It gathers together essays that engage with objects of study ranging from poetry, prose, and political ideas to painting, porcelain, and popular song, and which draw on examples in Icelandic, Arabic, German, Irish, Hungarian, and French, among other languages. The contributors study transcultural phenomena from the medieval and early modern periods through to the modern and postmodern era, frequently challenging conventional periodizations and analytical frameworks based on the idea of the nation-state.